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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Robust Pretty Good Measurement via Hybrid Classical-Quantum Pseudoinverse Approximation and Circuit-Level Realization

arXiv:2606.13150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretty Good Measurement (PGM) is a near-optimal strategy for quantum state discrimination, but its practical realization becomes unstable when the ensemble operator is singular or ill-conditioned. We introduce a numerically robust PGM formulation based on the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse, replacing the standard inverse square root with a threshold-regularized variant that remains well-defined across different spectral regimes. We develop a hybrid classical-quantum framework that combines pseudoinverse-based spectral preprocessing with quantum circuit realizations using block-encoding and spectral-transformation techniques. The framework incorporates support awareness, yielding physically meaningful measurement operators even in rank-deficient cases, and employs oblivious amplitude amplification to improve circuit-level success probabilities. Extensive numerical and circuit-level simulations show close agreement between theoretical predictions and quantum circuit outputs. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets, including ill-conditioned and degenerate scenarios, demonstrate stable discrimination performance where standard PGM becomes numerically unstable. The results establish a practical hybrid classical-quantum framework for robust quantum state discrimination and extend previous circuit-based implementations of the PGM testing stage toward pseudoinverse-aware measurement design.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-14

Antibody fine specificity correlates with protection from malaria for the RTS,S vaccine in young African children: A post hoc analysis of a phase IIb randomised controlled trial

Authors:

by Alessia Hysa, D. Herbert Opi, Joshua Waterhouse, Sandra Chishimba, Jessica L. Horton, Natalie Kingston, Hans J. Netter, David Wetzel, Michael Piontek, Gaoqian Feng, Jahit Sacarlal, Carlota Dobaño, Liriye Kurtovic, James G. Beeson Background The RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine was recently approved for implementation in children, but only provides modest and short-lived efficacy against malaria. RTS,S targets a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) circumsporozoite protein (CSP), comprising the central NANP-repeat region and C-terminal domain. Mechanisms of immunity and correlates of protection for the RTS,S vaccine are not well defined, hindering progress towards generating highly effective CSP-based vaccines. Methods and findings We investigated epitope specificity and cross-reactivity of vaccine-induced antibodies to six peptides representing CSP epitopes in the N-terminal and central NANP-repeat region. We evaluated antibody reactivity in preclinical mouse vaccine studies, among CSP-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and in a large RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial in young children 1–4 years old (n = 735).The preclinical mouse vaccine studies and CSP-specific mAbs were used to initially evaluate IgG responses to the six peptides. Mice immunised with the central NANP-repeat region had IgG with cross-reactivity to an epitope in the N-terminal region. Additionally, we demonstrated that a single CSP-specific mAb could display cross-reactivity to several CSP epitopes. Through post hoc quantification and analysis of antibody responses in the RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial, we found that a subset of children generated IgG with specificity for a short NANP-repeat epitope (NANP2; amino acid sequence: NANPNANP) and cross-reactivity to an N-terminal epitope (J1; amino acid sequence: KQPADGNPDPNANPN). Notably, children with high IgG responses to NANP2 and J1 had a significantly reduced risk of clinical malaria, compared to children with low responses (IgG to NANP2 (aHR: 0.838 (95% CI [0.716, 0.981]; p = 0.028)) and J1 (aHR: 0.718 (95% CI [0.611, 0.844]; p 

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

NeSyCat Torch: A Differentiable Tensor Implementation of Categorical Semantics for Neurosymbolic Learning

arXiv:2606.19279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic semantics is fragmented: classical, fuzzy, probabilistic and neural systems each define truth by their own inductive rules. NeSyCat, extending ULLER, subsumes them under a single inductive definition of truth, parametric in a strong monad and an aggregation structure on truth-values. NeSyCat has so far lacked an account of predicates and functions learned by neural networks. We provide NeSyCat Torch as the missing link and interpret computational symbols via neural networks, implementing the framework in probabilistic programming and tensor-based backends. We use the distribution monad for reference semantics and metric evaluation, and complement it by a monad for numerically stable, differentiable training: the lazy log-tensor monad over the log-semiring. For efficient training in batches, we furthermore employ a batch monad. The axioms are the source code: written once in monad-based do-notation, monadic bind performs marginalisation, lazily pruning unneeded branches. On MNIST addition, our HaskTorch, JAX, and PyTorch implementations outperform LTN and DeepProbLog in speed and accuracy, while achieving nearly the accuracy of DeepStochLog. However, unlike DeepStochLog, we stay in a uniform framework that applies to many first-order NeSy approaches. Namely, the construction is parametric in the monad; instantiating it with, e.g., the Giry monad extends the approach to continuous probability (working out a neural representation here is left for future work).

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Interference Queueing Networks: A Replica Mean-Field Approach in the Symmetric Setting

arXiv:2606.13264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a model for evaluating the performance of wireless communication networks beyond the ubiquitous full-buffer assumption, under which every transmitter is always active. The network is represented by N interacting queues arranged on a torus, with homogeneous arrival rate and service rates depending on the activity of neighboring interferers. More precisely, each queue is associated with a transmitter-receiver pair, and its service rate is given by the Shannon capacity, which depends on the corresponding Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR). Since interfering transmitters only emit when their queue is non-empty, the SINR and hence the service rate improves when neighboring queues are empty. We derive the stability region of the system, together with approximations of its stationary distribution and its exponential rate of convergence to stationarity. These approximations are obtained via a replica mean-field limit, for which we establish propagation of chaos and long-time behavior results.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

arXiv:2606.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SpectralDiT: Timestep-Conditioned Spectral Residual Correction for Flow-Matching DiTs

Authors:

We propose SpectralDiT, a lightweight modification to flow-matching Diffusion Transformers that adds timestep-conditioned spectral correction to the MLP residual branch. The module decomposes each residual update into low- and high-frequency components on the patch-token grid, then learns a zero-initialized additive gate so the model initially matches the baseline DiT. On CIFAR-10 pixel-space generation, SpectralDiT improves FID from 20.78 to 19.71 at patch size 1 and reduces the radial Fourier spectrum gap. Furthermore, we scale our method to latent diffusion on ImageNet-100. With 0.6% additional theoretical FLOPs and 1.36% additional parameters, SpectralDiT improves latent flow-matching, achieving an 8.7% relative FID reduction under classifier-free guidance (CFG 2.0). All reported results are averaged over five seeds. Ablations and gate visualizations on CIFAR-10 reveal stable block-specific spectral correction patterns.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Protein Design with Agent Rosetta: A Case Study for Specialized Scientific Agents

arXiv:2603.15952v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are capable of emulating reasoning and using tools, creating opportunities for autonomous agents that execute complex scientific tasks. Protein design provides a natural testbed: although machine learning (ML) methods achieve strong results, these are largely restricted to canonical amino acids and narrow objectives, leaving unfilled need for a generalist tool for broad design pipelines. We introduce Agent Rosetta, an LLM agent paired with a structured environment for operating Rosetta, the leading physics-based heteropolymer design software, capable of modeling non-canonical building blocks and geometries. Agent Rosetta iteratively refines designs to achieve user-defined objectives, combining LLM reasoning with Rosetta's generality. We evaluate Agent Rosetta on design with canonical amino acids, matching specialized models and expert baselines, and with non-canonical residues – where ML approaches fail – achieving comparable performance. Critically, prompt engineering alone often fails to generate Rosetta actions, demonstrating that environment design is essential for integrating LLM agents with specialized software. Our results show that properly designed environments enable LLM agents to make scientific software accessible while matching specialized tools and human experts.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Geometric Action Model for Robot Policy Learning

Generalist robot policies must follow user instructions while reasoning about how objects, cameras, and robot actions interact in the 3D physical world. Recent vision-language-action models (VLAs) and video world-action models (WAMs) inherit strong semantic or temporal priors from large-scale foundation models, but they still operate primarily on 2D image frames or 2D-derived latent spaces, leaving implicit the 3D geometry required for contact-rich manipulation. We propose the Geometric Action Model (GAM), a language-conditioned manipulation policy that directly repurposes a pretrained geometric foundation model (GFM) as a shared substrate for perception, temporal prediction, and action decoding. GAM splits the GFM at an intermediate layer: the shallow layers serve as an observation encoder, and a causal future predictor inserted at the split layer forecasts future latent tokens conditioned on language, proprioception, and action history. The predicted future tokens are then routed through the remaining GFM blocks for feature propagation and decoding, allowing a single backbone to produce both future geometry and actions. This design equips the GFM with language-conditioned temporal world modeling through minimal architectural modification while preserving its rich geometric priors. Across a broad suite of simulation and real-robot manipulation benchmarks, GAM is more accurate, more robust, faster, and lighter than current foundation-model-scale baselines.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Reservoir Attention Network: Cross-Pass State in Pretrained Transformers via Content-Addressable Reservoir Injection

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A feasibility and dynamics study of the Reservoir Attention Network (RAN), an architecture that injects a fixed, randomly-initialized reservoir into the mid-layer attention of a pretrained transformer to carry state across forward passes. Experiments span GPT-2 (124M, 355M) to Qwen2.5 (0.5B, 1.5B) on a single consumer GPU. The tasks are minimal probes chosen to isolate individual mechanisms; the broader always-alive agent vision is treated throughout as compute-limited future work, not a claim of this paper. The reservoir is left untrained (fixed random) by design: this isolates whether untrained recurrent dynamics alone suffice to carry usable cross-pass state, leaving trained recurrence as a complementary, more expensive direction.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Online Shift Detection and Conformal Adaptation for Deployed Safety Classifiers

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an online monitoring system for distributional shift in deployed safety classifiers, using calibrated sequential statistics to detect when a classifier has moved out of distribution. Upon detection, a conformal abstention layer adapts decision thresholds to recover a target error rate epsilon=0.1. In a pre-registered factorial evaluation (4 classifiers x 5 shift conditions x 20 seeds x 2 window sizes, 800 cells), the system achieves 86.6% valid detection (693/800, 95% CI [84.1%, 88.8%]) with mean latency of 39.5 steps. Detection holds across three ground-truth regimes: synthetic onset (86.6%), real temporal jailbreaks (85%, 17/20), and GCG adversarial attacks. Weighted conformal prediction recovers up to 39 pp of lost coverage for DeBERTa (ESS=46/300) but collapses for all other classifiers (ESS~300): logistic density ratio estimation achieves perfect source/target separability in high-dimensional embedding spaces, clipping all importance weights to the floor. DeBERTa shows a gradient from effective correction (paraphrase, ESS=46) to near-total collapse (adversarial suffix, ESS=206). PCA to 32 dimensions breaks the collapse, recovering 33 pp for Llama Guard and 21 pp for ShieldGemma. Variance decomposition reveals classifier (eta^2=0.243), shift type (eta^2=0.237), and their interaction (eta^2=0.185) all contribute substantially to detection latency variance (all p

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

SPA-C: an hybrid tool to accurately scaffold genomes using Hi-C and Deep-Learning

Genome assembly is a computational pipeline designed to reconstruct chromosomes from small sequencing reads. Following their assembly, contiguous sequences (contigs) are arranged into chromosome-long sequences during scaffolding. Hi-C, a long-range linkage information between regions of the genome widely used in recent large sequencing projects, is often required to correctly order contigs. Several tools have been developed to automate this task following either statistical or deep-learning approaches. Statistical approaches summarise 2D Hi-C matrices into contact densities across sequences, thus ignoring informative visual patterns. The sole existing deep-learning tool uses a transformer-based computer vision model to correct the assembly. It has been trained on several species and uses Hi-C matrices directly. Yet it comes as a supplementary step in the scaffolding process, introducing extra computation time, and has been trained on a dataset that might contain labelling errors, which could provide sub-optimal results. We propose SPA-C, an hybrid pipeline combining the strengths of both approaches. Linkage prediction is handled with a frugal CNN-based model and a graph-solving algorithm is used to generate the scaffolds. Through our input's design, the model is able to both correct errors within assemblies and link contigs, leveraging small, local Hi-C contact matrices. We handled low-complexity regions that might induce erroneous predictions using an external tool, improving the overall accuracy of generated assemblies. On a benchmark of six various genomes and four standard metrics, SPA-C outperformed four out of four state-of-the-art methods while achieving comparable start-to-end computation time.Python and Bash scripts are available on GitHub (https://github.com/SPA-C/SPA-C.git) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19000361).

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

EffGen: Enabling Small Language Models as Capable Autonomous Agents

Most existing language model agentic systems today are built and optimized for large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini) via API calls; while powerful, this approach faces several limitations including high token costs and privacy concerns for sensitive applications. We introduce EffGen, an open-source agentic framework optimized for small language models (SLMs) that enables effective, efficient, and secure local deployment. EffGen makes four major contributions: (1) Enhanced tool-calling with prompt optimization that compresses input prompts by up to 70-80% (and 57% on average across our benchmarks) while preserving task semantics, (2) Intelligent task decomposition that breaks complex queries into parallel or sequential subtasks based on dependencies, (3) Complexity-based routing using five factors to make smart pre-execution decisions, and (4) Unified memory system combining short-term, long-term, and vector-based storage. Additionally, EffGen unifies multiple agent protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) for cross-protocol communication. Results on 13 benchmarks show EffGen outperforms LangChain, AutoGen, and Smolagents with higher success rates, faster execution, and lower memory. Our results reveal that prompt optimization and complexity routing have complementary scaling behavior: optimization benefits SLMs more (11.2% gain at 1.5B vs 2.4% at 32B), while routing benefits large models more (3.6% at 1.5B vs 7.9% at 32B), providing consistent gains across all scales when combined. EffGen is released under the Apache 2.0 License, ensuring broad accessibility for research and commercial use, with the code available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/effGen, the Python package at https://pypi.org/project/effgen/ (pip install effgen), and the project website and documentation at https://effgen.org/ and https://docs.effgen.org/.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Extraction of Glaucoma Diagnosis, Type, and Severity from Clinical Notes using Secure Cloud-based Large Language Models

Purpose: To evaluate the performance of secure cloud-based large language models (LLMs) in extracting glaucoma diagnosis, type, and severity from free-text clinical notes in the electronic health record (EHR). Design: Retrospective chart review analysis. Participants: 1,250 subjects from the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Methods: Clinical notes of glaucoma-related encounters between 2014 and 2024 were extracted from the Bascom Palmer Ophthalmic Repository. Two fellowship-trained glaucoma specialists annotated clinical notes for glaucoma presence, type, and severity at the eye level. The dataset was split into development (10%), validation (10%), and test (80%) sets. Development and validation sets were used for prompt engineering and refinement, and the held-out test set was used for evaluation. Five LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, DeepSeek-V3.2, GPT-5.2, Grok 4.1, and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) were accessed via Azure AI Foundry within HIPAA-compliant containers. Model performance was assessed using standard metrics. Clinician-entered ICD-10 codes were also compared with adjudicated labels. Main Outcome Measures: Gwet AC1, accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score. Results: Inter-grader agreement was high for glaucoma detection (Gwet AC1= 0.930 (95% CI: 0.917-0.945), type classification (Gwet AC1= 0.917 (95% CI: 0.904-0.930), and severity staging (Gwet AC1= 0.901 (95% CI: 0.884-0.916). For glaucoma diagnosis, LLMs demonstrated high overall accuracy, with Claude achieving 97.5%, DeepSeek 96.0%, GPT 96.2%, Grok 94.4%, and Qwen 95.5%. F1 scores for glaucoma detection ranged from 95.4% to 98.9% across models. For glaucoma type classification, accuracies were 97.1%, 94.2%, 94.2%, 94.0%, and 94.4% for Claude, DeepSeek, GPT, Grok, and Qwen, respectively. F1 scores for the most prevalent type (POAG) ranged from 96.3% to 98.9%. For severity staging, accuracies were 95.0%, 94.8%, 94.5%, 94.0%, and 95.2%, respectively, with F1 scores ranging from 89.7% to 96.3% across severity categories and models. ICD-10 codes demonstrated substantially lower performance for type and severity staging, with overall accuracies of 89.2% and 58.5%, respectively. Conclusions: Secure cloud-based LLMs accurately extracted glaucoma diagnosis, type, and severity information from free-text ophthalmology notes, achieving performance approaching expert clinician adjudication while substantially outperforming ICD-based phenotyping approaches, particularly for disease severity classification. These findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs to transform unstructured clinical documentation into scalable, research-ready phenotypic data for large-scale glaucoma cohort development and EHR-based ophthalmic research.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Chroma-gated, differentiable OKLCH interpolation: Continuous Oklab fallback for color-cast reduction

OKLCH – the cylindrical (lightness, chroma, hue) form of Ottosson's Oklab color space – is the interpolation space recommended by CSS Color 4 for gradients and color-mix(), and it is now broadly deployed. Its polar parameterization, however, casts color near the neutral axis in two ways: (1) an inter-hue detour between two chromatic endpoints that sweeps through an unintended hue (blue to yellow visibly passing through green), and (2) an off-line bow when one endpoint is achromatic. Existing remedies are uniformly two-valued – a threshold switch that fires only at an achromatic endpoint – so they address only (2); on chromatic pairs every one of them reduces to raw OKLCH, leaving the (1) inter-hue cast untreated. We introduce Continuous Oklab fallback (COFb), a one-parameter, differentiable chroma gate $w(C)=C^n/(C^n+\sigma^n)$ that continuously blends the OKLCH path toward the linear Oklab path as chroma falls. A single gate reduces the (1) cast that the two-valued family leaves untreated and unifies the handling of (1) and (2) without any endpoint test. We characterize a cast-hue trade-off frontier, adopt a default ($n=1$, the rational Michaelis-Menten form; $\sigma\approx0.19$ for a typical sRGB palette, from a normalization-independent cast-half criterion), and verify the gate's properties symbolically. At the default, COFb halves the inter-hue path detour (mean lateral deviation -49.5%, chroma-weighted hue excursion -35.5%). We also state the method's limits: on (2) alone the two-valued switch remains better, and like any Cartesian blend COFb does not preserve chroma. In deployment, COFb runs entirely in plain Oklab (a,b) to sRGB, so it serves as a fallback that delivers the same cast-reduced gradients where modern CSS color interpolation (color-mix(in oklch) and the like) is unavailable – older engines, image and video pipelines, or GPU shaders.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Improving Crash Frequency Prediction from Simulated Traffic Conflicts Using Machine Learning Based Microsimulation

arXiv:2606.12500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traffic microsimulation combined with surrogate safety measures has increasingly been used as a proactive alternative to historical crash data for predicting crash frequency for current or planned road infrastructure designs. However, existing microsimulation-based safety studies have adopted simplified rule-based behaviour models, which reproduce traffic flow reasonably well but often fail to generate realistic conflict dynamics, limiting crash prediction accuracy. Recent advances in machine learning (ML)-based behaviour models offer a promising opportunity to potentially improve microsimulation realism and crash frequency predictions by learning human driving behaviour directly from large-scale trajectory datasets. To investigate this possibility, traffic microsimulation was conducted for five real-world signalised intersections in Leeds, UK, using both a standard rule-based model and a state-of-the-art ML model. Simulated vehicle trajectories were analysed using a two-dimensional Time-to-Collision metric to identify simulated conflicts, which were then modelled using Extreme Value Theory to predict crash frequency. Results show that conflicts from the ML model yielded crash predictions in line with the real-world crash data, whereas the rule-based model did not permit meaningful predictions, presumably due to a lack of model calibration to the specific simulated intersections. Directly using ML-generated simulated crashes to predict real-world crash frequency also yielded poor results, suggesting that while current ML models can realistically reproduce conflicts, they are not yet able to generate realistic crashes. Overall, the findings demonstrate that ML-based behaviour models are promising for improving crash prediction from simulated conflicts, without a need for location-specific model calibration, and suggest clear future directions for ML-based traffic microsimulation.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DADP: Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy

arXiv:2602.04037v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning domain adaptive policies that can generalize to unseen transition dynamics, remains a fundamental challenge in learning-based control. Substantial progress has been made through domain representation learning to capture domain-specific information, thus enabling domain-aware decision making. We analyze the process of learning domain representations through dynamical prediction and find that selecting contexts adjacent to the current step causes the learned representations to entangle static domain information with varying dynamical properties. Such mixture can confuse the conditioned policy, thereby constraining zero-shot adaptation. To tackle the challenge, we propose DADP (Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy), which achieves robust adaptation through unsupervised disentanglement and domain-aware diffusion injection. First, we introduce Lagged Context Dynamical Prediction, a strategy that conditions future state estimation on a historical offset context; by increasing this temporal gap, we unsupervisedly disentangle static domain representations by filtering out transient properties. Second, we integrate the learned domain representations directly into the generative process by biasing the prior distribution and reformulating the diffusion target. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks across locomotion and manipulation demonstrate the superior performance, and the generalizability of DADP over prior methods. More visualization results are available on the https://outsider86.github.io/DomainAdaptiveDiffusionPolicy/.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Latent Action Pretraining Through World Modeling

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have gained popularity for learning robotic manipulation tasks that follow language instructions. State-of-the-art VLAs, such as OpenVLA and $\pi_{0}$, were trained on large-scale, manually labeled action datasets collected through teleoperation. More recent approaches, including LAPA and villa-X, introduce latent action representations that enable unsupervised pretraining on unlabeled datasets by modeling abstract visual changes between frames. Although these methods have shown strong results, their large model sizes make deployment in real-world settings challenging. In this work, we propose LAWM, a model-agnostic framework to pretrain imitation learning models in a self-supervised way, by learning latent action representations from unlabeled video data through world modeling. These videos can be sourced from robot recordings or videos of humans performing actions with everyday objects. Our framework is able to transfer learned knowledge across tasks, environments, and embodiments. It outperforms models pretrained with ground-truth robot actions and other similar pretraining methods on the LIBERO benchmark and real-world setup, while being efficient and practical for real-world settings.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Preregistration for Experiments with AI Agents

arXiv:2606.11217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents has given rise to a rapidly growing methodological paradigm: "in silico" behavioral experiments. Originally conceived as a way to use AI agents as proxies for human participants in studies of cognition, decision-making, and social dynamics, this approach has taken on new significance – as AI agents increasingly negotiate, transact, and make consequential decisions on behalf of people and organizations, understanding their behavior has become a research priority in its own right. While these experiments with AI agents offer unprecedented advantages in terms of scalability, cost efficiency, and experimental control, they also inherit, and in some cases amplify, methodological vulnerabilities that have long plagued human subjects research. To address these issues, this paper argues that preregistration practices – central to improving the credibility of human subjects experiments – should now be extended to experiments with AI agents. We systematically catalog the researcher degrees of freedom that experiments with AI agents introduce – model selection, prompt wording, settings, and outcome-contingent redesign, for example – and show how the low cost of iteration and lack of reporting norms make these choices both easy to exploit and difficult to detect. We propose a preregistration template tailored to experiments with AI agents and call on conferences, journals, and funding agencies to make preregistration standard practice for this emerging research paradigm.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

Agent skills – structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities – have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill. In this work, we present an evaluation framework that lets a skill author construct realistic tasks to rigorously assess the aspects of a skill that matter most to them, and that estimates skill utility by solving those tasks. Further, we apply our evaluation approach at scale to 500 real-world skills, generating 1,000 tasks derived from the skills' content, along with instruction-following and goal-completion scoring rubrics. Using these metrics, we evaluate how 19 agent-model configurations, both proprietary and open-source, perform on the tasks. Our results show that models vary widely in how closely they adhere to the instructions encoded in skills, leading to substantial differences in their performance gains. Furthermore, we show that access to a skill significantly changes model behavior compared to the no-skill setup, providing an essential mechanism for encoding opinionated workflows into LLM agents. We release our evaluation dataset to support future work on agent skills.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum metrology via partial quantum error correction

arXiv:2605.08341v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a method for error-corrected quantum metrology where only partial quantum error correction (QEC) is needed to suppress local noise and maintain the probe states' super-standard-quantum-limit (super-SQL) sensing performance. This stands in contrast to the existing QEC-assisted sensing schemes in Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 080801 (2014) and Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 150802 (2014), where a probe state is encoded into the logical subspace of a quantum code and error correction involves measurements on all checks of the code. Here, we encode the probe states into superpositions of energetically different states of the underlying quantum code. For our probe states, error correction using a subset of checks is enough to suppress noise both before and after phase imprinting. We analyze the tradeoff in noise suppression. For noise parallel to our phase imprinter of weight $l$, we achieve a suppression of $p^\delta$ where $p$ is the noise strength and $\delta = \lfloor (l+1)/2 \rfloor$. We propose an adaptive imprinter weight increasing strategy to maintain super-SQL performance as we scale up the system. In all our examples, checks and phase imprinters are chosen to be local operators avoiding non-local connectivity.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Single Distortion Artifacts and Mmultifactorial Clinical Quality: Few-shot Biparametric MRI Quality Assessment via Distortion-trained Prototypical Networks

Clinical prostate multi-parametric MRI relies heavily on high-quality diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), yet reading DWI is frequently compromised by geometric distortion, often caused by rectal air. Assessing quality via the PI-QUAL scoring system is an emerging clinical standard, but it is subjective, time-consuming and suffers from a class imbalance where low-quality cases are diverse and relatively scarce. Using the PRIME clinical trial as an example, there are $6\%$ images with PI-QUAL scores lower than 4, $87\%$ of DWI issues are due to distortion. Many of the other clinical quality issues are under-represented. To address this common dual-scarcity of annotated clinical data, we propose a few-shot biparametric prototypical network for automated image quality assessment (IQA). Our framework utilizes a dual-branch 3D ResNet to fuse T2-weighted and DWI features, providing anatomical context to distinguish true morphology from distortion. To handle real-world heterogeneity, we introduce feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and a gradient reversal layer (GRL) to align feature distributions conditioned on varying b-values while suppressing acquisition-related biases. We demonstrate that a model meta-trained solely on comparatively objective, readily obtainable distortion labels can effectively adapt to predicting complex, multi-factorial clinical quality scores such as PI-QUAL using only five representative samples. Experimental results on two datasets show that our method significantly outperforms few-shot learning baselines for this challenging IQA task, offering a practically feasible and data-efficient solution for standardizing prostate MRI quality control in clinical workflows.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Benchmarks to Skills: Low-Rank Factors for LLM Evaluation

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) rely heavily on a growing collection of benchmarks and on aggregate benchmark scores, yet it remains unclear what this comparison actually captures, and what these scores reveal about models' underlying capabilities. Here, we propose a new paradigm for LLM evaluation, by asking whether benchmark performance reflects many independent abilities, or rather relies on a small number of shared dimensions. To answer this, we apply Factor Analysis (FA) to a massive performance matrix of LLMs versus benchmarks \((60\times44)\) revealing an intrinsically low-rank structure of that matrix. That is, a small number of latent factors captures most of the structure in the full task space. This low-rank geometry reveals substantial redundancy across existing tasks and explains why many benchmarks appear to be measuring overlapping abilities. We further show that these latent factors correspond to coherent, skill-like, dimensions of LLM behavior. Leveraging this latent skill-space, we deliver three practical tools for LLM evaluation and downstream users: (i)~identifying redundant tasks, (ii)~profiling new models using a small subset of tasks, and (iii)~selecting models aligned with desired skill profiles. Our method provides a solid alternative to the de-facto standard of a single aggregate score, and establishes an interpretable and practical framework for understanding and benchmarking LLM core capabilities.